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"What did you mean 'executioner'?" Rafiel asked. He leaned against a heavy carved rosewood table in Tom's rented room at Spurs and Lace.

Kyrie must have been right about the crazy idea behind the name. The suite felt like a mashup of Old West and Old Whorehouse. It was bigger than a room, consisting of a bedroom with a queen-size bed, a sofa dripping in velvet and fringe, a dresser that would take five men and a winch to transport, and a hat rack with three cowboy hats on it, and a small sitting area in a projection that was part of a tower, surrounded by windows. The sitting area was outfitted with two too-precious-for-words carved wood armchairs, whose cushions were tormented by a print featuring cowboy boots and roses in random profusion.

Then there was the bathroom, which had a heavy rosewood table facing it. Above the table hung a gold-leaf-framed mirror and above that, on the flowered-wallpaper wall, a pair of spurs.

Rafiel shut his eyes, because you could go nuts trying to make sense of this stuff, and said, "What could he mean by executioner? And why would anyone want to execute us?"

"I think it was the larvae, you know, the ones who died in the fire. Old Joe says the Ancient Ones can feel . . . death on that scale. And that they're looking for the culprits."

"The culprits!" Rafiel heard the sound that came out of his throat, derisive like a cat spitting. "What about the shifters who were being murdered before that?"

"I don't know," Tom sounded exhausted. Rafiel heard the water go off, then the shower curtain close. "Perhaps they think that we did those too."

"And who are they?" Rafiel asked, feeling the anger in his voice and knowing he was projecting his fear into anger and throwing it at Tom. "These Ancient Ones," Rafiel said with less force. "It's pretty absurd to be judged by people you don't know and whose rules you can't understand. Who are they? What do they want?"

Tom came out of the bathroom, fully dressed, though it didn't seem like he'd have had time. He was limping, and his foot showed red slashes across it. Rafiel remembered the dire wolf biting at Tom's back paw.

Tom limped to the bed, sat down, and started putting socks on. "They're a group. I think they're a group of shifters who have lived very long lives."

"Oh?" Rafiel said. "What's very long? And should we be looking for a group then, or just one man?" Something tickled at the back of his mind, but he couldn't quite pinpoint it.

Tom shrugged. "I honestly don't know," he said. "Because, you see . . . Old Joe . . ." He shrugged again, wincing as he stood tentatively on his wounded foot and looked about for his boot. "Old Joe, you know, is vague. He drifts in and out of reality, and it's hard to tell. He told me that the Ancient Ones were around before horses."

"Before horses evolved? Or before they were domesticated?" Rafiel asked. "Because either way . . ."

"It's unlikely? Yeah. I know. That's why I said he's unreliable. And he said that this creature, the dire wolf, had come to town, that he was their executioner, but he didn't say that the rest of them hadn't come too. Or how many there were. For all I know, and presuming that this story is true—and the executioner thing seems to be—then, you know, it could be that we're looking for anything between a busload of shifters as old as time, and two or three sixty-year-old shifters." He shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."

But his words had tickled something in Rafiel's mind. Two or three shifters. "At the aquarium," he said, "Kyrie and I caught at least two different scent trails. Maybe three."

"Oh?" Tom tensed, looking up. "Any of them our friend the wolf?"

Rafiel shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "At least the smell wasn't right. Though all the scents were so faded . . ." He shrugged.

"You know," Tom said, "that's the other choice. No Ancient Ones, no conspiracy of shifters. Just Old Joe going senile, and one homicidal dire wolf shifter." He'd found his boots, and was putting them on. "Who knows how many of us are homicidal? It was always my fear that I'd go that way." Tom's boots were work boots, probably picked up second- or thirdhand at some time when Tom was doing manual labor. But even looking vaguely like weapons of mayhem, they were part of Tom.

Rafiel had seen Tom turn back into high danger to recover them. Lacing them as tightly as that had to hurt his injured foot, but who was Rafiel to interfere with his friend's masochism?

"Unfortunately," Tom said, "I don't think that's it. I don't think it's just Old Joe and our dire acquaintance. When has our life been that easy?"

 

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Framed